


A Brighter World

by ajestice



Category: The Orville (TV)
Genre: F/M, Human/Krill Romance, I REGRET NOTHING, Interspecies Romance, SEXY LIZARD MEN, Slow Burn, Thalon is the Krill that was captured in S1-E1, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Worldbuilding, aliens need love too, and every villain is the hero of his own story, angst and fluff and smut and action, as of right now this story does NOT involve any canon characters, because we know almost nothing about them, but it involves a lot of technobabble, don't worry it gets resolved eventually, grumpy krill warrior, it's SPACE MAGIC OKAY, let me explain, seriously i have no idea what I'm doing, snarky human scientist, the krill aren't QUITE as bad as they seem, they are literally snowed in together, yes I went there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2019-10-08 12:55:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 20,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17386844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ajestice/pseuds/ajestice
Summary: Sam is an expert in xenobiology; she's treated every known species in the quadrant, except for one. Well, technically two, but the Kaylons don't really count. So when she's offered the opportunity to treat a dying Krill soldier named Thalon, she leaps at the chance. And, by some miracle, she actually manages to save him.Now, a massive snowstorm is threatening to engulf the science base, and if they don't get offworld soon, they're all dead.Wait, the station is also under attack by enemy hostiles? Great. Are they Krill? Of course they are.Oh, and one of them is Thalon's over-protective big brother?SUPER.-Alternatively: What do you get when you take a grumpy Krill warrior and a snarky human doctor and you trap them together on a mining outpost in the middle of nowhere during a deadly snowstorm? A lot of growling, bickering, and unresolved sexual tension, that's what.





	1. Rising Storm

**Author's Note:**

> This idea just wouldn't leave me alone. I am building on what little we know about the Krill, but where that ends, my imagination begins, and I have done the best I can. 
> 
> Also, I don't know shit about medical procedures, but then, this story takes place in a time when Molecular Surgery and DNA Engineering is a thing, so I'm leaning heavily on the 'Sci-Fi Medicine is Space Magic' crutch. Enjoy. <3

**[SAMANTHA]**  
  
At 0600 on the morning of evacuation, Samantha Douglas stepped into her dimly lit medbay with a cup of coffee in one hand and a datapad in the other. Stifling a yawn, she slid into her chair and, after a moment of hesitation, tossed the datapad onto the table. Priorities were important, after all. And good coffee was hard to come by on Hanara.

She used her free hand to activate her biolink, and the console at her desk flickered to life, casting a gentle blue glow over the pale, prone figure resting on the exam table beside her.

Sam smiled as a pair of glittering black eyes slid open and fixed on her.

“Punctual, as always, I see,” he said in a soft, rasping voice.

“Good morning, Thalon.” She took a sip of her coffee and scanned his biofeed. “How are you feeling?”

He grunted. “No different than before.”

Sam nodded. In all honesty, that was a good sign. It meant that the disconnection had been successful; the medbay itself was no longer actively providing direct medical support.

She glanced down at his arms. The tubes and filaments previously embedded in his skin had retracted back up into the medical array that arched across the exam table. Instead, only a thin silver bracelet encircled his right wrist.

“The biocuff will continue to administer fluids and nutrients as needed during the flight. We depart at 0700, so Caleb and L’tek will be here in half an hour to help us get you to the transport vessel.” She paused for another sip of coffee, scanning his vitals as they refreshed on the monitor, and blinked in surprise. “Hey, your oxygen rate has improved!”

“Has it?” His gaze did not waver, but his lips curled up in a ghost of a smile. “Interesting.”

His eyes had unnerved her, at first. No species evolved under perfectly identical circumstances, but during her career, she had begun to recognize a series of common trends.

Direct sunlight was one of them.

But, despite the astronomically low odds, the Krill had evolved in a world of darkness. Their pale skin allowed them to absorb what little ultraviolet radiation they required, their binary circulatory system gave them the ability to regulate their body temperature in extreme environments, and their sight had adapted to see in near-total darkness.

Now, when she looked in his eyes, she did not see the eerie blackness of an empty abyss. She simply saw _him_.

“Yes, it is,” she agreed, lifting an eyebrow. “And it means you owe me another question.” 

Thalon huffed, a gesture that seemed equal parts amused and annoyed, before leaning his head back and closing his eyes. “If you insist."

Sam sat back in her chair, eyeing him over the rim of her coffee cup. In the past four weeks since she’d been brought here to treat him, they had developed an… understanding, of sorts. She wouldn’t go so far as to call it friendship, but it was more than what he’d had with any of the other medical personnel on Hanara.

When she’d first arrived, Thalon had been slowly, but inexorably, dying. Despite being put in a medically-induced coma and fed a constant stream of nutrients and medication, he was continuing to lose weight, and his vitals were steadily declining.

He had been fading away, and the best medical and scientific minds in the Union had been helpless to save him.

Sam hadn’t had much luck, either. At first.

She set her coffee aside and leaned forward. “What’s your favorite color?”

Thalon did not open his eyes. “You are wasting a great opportunity by asking such useless questions."

“They’re not useless if they help me get to know you better.”

“I believe your superiors would strongly disagree.” His voice was soft, but the sarcasm within it was vibrant and sharp.

“Screw them,” she said with a wave of her hand, turning away to pick up her coffee. “They’re not my superiors.”

“Is anyone?”

Sam snorted a laugh. When she turned back, he was watching her with that same blank, unreadable expression on his face.

“Well, there’s you, for starters,” she said. “The psychoanalysts estimate your IQ to be somewhere in the upper 180’s. And you threw Morlo clear across the room when he tried to take a blood sample, last week.”

Thalon growled faintly. “I do not like needles.”

“You scared the hell out of him,” Sam added. “He quit on Friday.”

“Good.” Thalon jerked his chin upwards, as if spearing an invisible enemy with his chin horns. “I did not like him.”

Sam tilted her head, curious. “You didn’t?” She hadn’t been overly fond of Morlo, either, but that was beside the point. “Why not?”

Thalon made another vague gesture with his hands. "I have my reasons."

Sam narrowed her eyes, but she couldn't stop the grin that curled her lips. “I’ll let that slide, since it wasn’t my question.”

“Had you not wasted your question in the first place, you would not have to ‘let it slide,’ as you say.”

“Smartass," she teased.

“Human insults are alarmingly vulgar,” he noted in a dry voice. “Is there any body part that cannot somehow be twisted by your language into the form of a slur?”

Sam blinked at him. “You know, I honestly have no idea.”

He grunted a laugh, and then abruptly coughed. Sam leaned forward, frowning as she scanned his oxygen levels.

“Your lungs are still healing,” she said. “Try to take it easy.”

He shot her a faint frown. “Another idiom?”

“Yes.” She reached up to tap the display on the control panel that stretched across the exam table. “Humans like to play with words to create new meanings. The more nonsensical, the better.”

“A strange game.”

“Yeah.” Sam grinned down at him. “But a fun one.”

As she reached over his chest to pull a display up and magnify it, she could feel Thalon’s eyes following her, tracking her movement with unwavering focus.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she mused as she slid back down into her chair.

He growled. “Now, you are just mocking me.”

“Teasing,” she corrected. “I’m _teasing_ you.”

He grumbled, but after a moment, his annoyance faded into a thoughtful frown.

Sam gave him all the time he needed, using the silence to enter her notes into the database. His blood pressure had also risen since last night. She still needed to get it up another six percent before it was back within a healthy range, but at least it was an improvement.

Finally, Thalon sighed and turned his head to look at her.

“You do not fear me.”

Sam lifted her eyebrows. “I have a healthy respect for your abilities, Thalon,” she said truthfully. “But… no, I’m not afraid of you.”

“Despite the fact that I am unrestrained,” he noted, “and far superior to you in physical strength, even in my current condition.”

Sam hesitated. She was perfectly aware of both facts, but neither had ever truly bothered her.

“I don’t like tying my patients down,” she said. “It’s… not helpful.”

“On that, we can agree,” he said with a nod. “But it does not explain your recklessness.”

Sam sighed and slumped back in her chair. “What do you want me to say? I just… I don’t feel like you’re the type of guy who would try to hurt me, just because you could. You…” she waved her hands around and gave a helpless shrug. “You seem like an honorable man.”

He was quiet for a long moment, his expression unchanging as he studied her with glinting black eyes.

“My actions towards your assistant would indicate otherwise.”

Sam made a face at her coffee cup. “Yeah, well, Morlo was… kind of a dick, truth be told.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“No,” Sam said with a sharp laugh. “No, it’s not. It means he was unpleasant to be around. He had… wandering hands.”

“Yes,” Thalon said in a flat voice. “I noticed.”

Sam decided to let that comment pass, hiding her smile in her cup.

“But that’s beside the point,” she said with a dismissive wave. “I’m not afraid of you because you’ve never given me any reason to be.”

Thalon did not immediately respond. He held her gaze for a moment longer, and then looked away.

“My people believe that all Krill are brothers in the eyes of Avis,” he said. "Past observation has indicated that such conviction is virtually nonexistent among your kind.”

Sam’s heart sank. She knew he didn’t consider her a friend, but it hurt, nonetheless, to hear him say it aloud. Still, she lifted her chin, infusing her expression with as much pride as she could muster.

“What’s your point?” she asked.

Thalon sighed.

“You trust me in the way that my people would, Samantha,” he said. “Without question, and without fear. It is… comforting.”

Sam ducked her head to hide the unexpected tears that stung her eyes. It was the first time he had said her name since they had met. Before, she had only been Human or Doctor.

“That’s…” she took a breath, struggling to control a sudden swell of emotion that threatened to choke her voice. “That’s good to hear, Thalon.” She took a deep breath and cleared her throat, lifting her head. “But you never did answer my question.”

If Krill could roll their eyes, he probably would have done so at that moment, but before he could answer, a low, trilling siren filled the room.

Sam leapt to her feet, peering up at the ominous red glow of the lights that pulsed along the ceiling and floor.

“Is this a drill?” she wondered, rounding the exam table and crossing the medbay. She stuck her head out the door to peer down the hallway, but it was empty and dark.

In the distance, she could hear men shouting, their voices rising in panic. The sound of it raised the tiny hairs on the back of her neck, and a primal bolt of fear shot down her spine, electrifying her nerves.

She sucked in a sharp breath and ducked back into the room, fighting to calm the rapid pounding of her heart.

A moment later, a series of sharp, crackling plasmashots echoed down the corridor.

She tapped her biolink. “Security, this is Douglas. I heard gunfire in the hangar bay; what’s your status?”

No answer.

“Security, do you copy?”

A blip of noise caused her heart to leap, but it was followed by empty static.

Sam grit her teeth and tried paging her medical assistant. “Caleb, do you copy?”

Silence.

“What the hell is going on?” she whispered.

A faint growl rumbled behind her, and Sam turned to find Thalon sitting upright on the exam table, his eyes hard and grim.

“It would appear,” he said quietly, “that we are under attack.”


	2. Growing Darkness

**[SAMANTHA]**

Sam curled her hands into fists as she stared at the medbay door. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her body felt like it was filled with ants, skittering across her nerves and biting at her skin.

This was bad.

Sam was a civilian contractor; she wasn’t Union military. She’d never been through basic training, or combat training, or any other sort of training that involved gunfire and enemy hostiles.

But…

She closed her eyes and forced herself to take several slow, deep breaths.

But she had been through medical school. And she’d spent four years as a Resident in the ER of one of busiest hospitals on Earth.

She had never been directly involved in combat, but she sure as hell had seen the direct results of it.

With shaking fingers, she entered the code to seal the medbay doors. She couldn’t risk moving Thalon by herself; he was a foot taller than her, and outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. If he stumbled, she wouldn’t be able to carry him.

She turned and crossed the room in silence, stepping into her office. The safe was concealed in the wall, but when she pressed her palm over the control panel, the section that covered the safe clicked open and slid to the side to reveal eight Union-issued phaser pistols.

She grabbed two of them and spun on her heel. When she stepped out of her office, Thalon was standing by the exam table, watching her with a curious frown.

The Union had initially confiscated everything he owned, but Sam had managed to retrieve the uniform that he’d been wearing beneath his armor when he was taken captive.

The thick, black fabric fit close to his body, but stretched enough to allow full range of movement. Up close, it had a very faint metallic sheen to it. Thalon had told her it was woven from a vine plant called _klatsa_ , which grew deep beneath the ground on his homeworld. It was so strong and resilient that, in the past, his people had discovered entire mountains suspended in the air, held up by massive networks of vines. Over time, the rock and soil beneath them had eroded away, and they had simply spread out further and anchored themselves in nearby crevices.

He had lost a great deal of weight during his illness, so the _klatsarit_ , as the uniform was called, hung loose and baggy on his gaunt frame. But he wore it with pride.

Sam still remembered the day she’d brought it to him. The look on his face had been worth all the ass-kissing she’d had to do to get it, and then some.

“Here,” she said, passing the phaser to him. “Hopefully they won’t check the medbay for survivors, but if they do, at least we’ll be ready for them.”

He huffed, glancing from her to the gun. “This is the first place they will check, Samantha.”

Sam’s heart dropped. “How do you know?”

“Because they are–”

A short blast echoed through the room. The door to the medbay slid open.

Sam spun around with a gasp.

And found herself face-to-face with five very large Krill warriors.

Christ. She hadn’t realized… Thalon had been on the verge of death when she’d first arrived. She’d been working to get him back to a normal body weight, but…

Compared to these guys, Thalon was a skeleton.

Especially the big one. He had to be the leader; his armor was different, outlined in dark silver. He was massive, his broad shoulders filling up the doorway. His expression was utterly blank, but his dark eyes were wide and alarmed. 

“You live,” he growled, his deep voice rumbling through the heavy silence. There was something about him, about his voice, and his eyes, that tugged at her mind, faint but frantic, and quickly buried beneath the surge of fear and adrenaline that was steadily creeping up and drowning out all proper thought.

He took a single step forward, and Samantha raised her gun. Instantly, the four Krill behind him lifted their weapons.

Her heart froze in her chest, her blood turned to ice.

But she did not waver.

The Krill who had spoken turned his gaze upon her, eyeing her as if she was a strange new creature he’d just discovered hiding under a rock.

“Lower your weapon, human,” he commanded.

First of all, her name was Samantha. Secondly, she did not take orders from him. And thirdly, he could take that superiority complex and shove it right up his lily white lizard ass.

She didn’t say any of that. She wanted to, but her brain seemed to have shorted out, and no longer appeared to hold the capacity for issuing complex instructions, so all she ended up saying was:

“No.”

The Krill growled low in his chest, his eyes narrowing.

“Do as he says.” It was Thalon, his voice low and calm.

Sam grit her teeth. Her hand was trembling. Her whole body was trembling. But her grip on the phaser was white-knuckled, and she had the bastard’s forehead right in her sights.

“No,” she said in a trembling voice. “He… he killed my colleagues.”

The big guy’s lip curled, but it was Thalon who answered.

“This is a dead planet. He is not here for them.” He stepped up beside her. “Lower your weapon, Samantha. Please.”

She sucked a sharp breath through her teeth. “Why?”

“Because he is my brother.”

She jerked her head back, her eyes jumping between Thalon and the big guy.

She’d been right. There _was_ something about his eyes.

Something _familiar_.

Her breath left her in a rush, and all the fight inside her went with it. She straightened her spine and lifted her chin, and very slowly, she lowered the phaser.

Out of the corner of her eye, she registered the tiniest hint of movement, and before her conscious mind could analyze it, her body was already moving of its own accord, throwing her hands up in front of her face in a futile attempt to block the oncoming blow.

It happened fast. Faster than she’d ever imagined it would.

One moment, the world was silent and still.

The next, there was nothing but light, and heat, and pain.

And then, finally, darkness.

 

* * *

 

**[THALON]**

He could remember when the Fading had first taken hold. He'd felt it, the vast, yawning emptiness growing in his chest where once, there had been strength and energy and life.

At first, this had troubled him, and he had struggled against it, fighting to keep a desperate hold on the last remaining shreds of his soul as they bled out of him and evaporated into the ether like smoke from a dying ember.

But eventually, even his will to live had begun to wither, and by that time, all the righteous, indignant fury in the galaxy wouldn’t have been enough to keep his soul anchored in this realm.

And so, he had let go.

For a long time, he had drifted. He remembered little, faint scraps of dialogue and brief flashes of color and light.

He hadn’t found dying to be a peaceful process. Nor had he found it to be particularly pleasant. Granted, he hadn’t expected it to be. But a part of him had hoped. That he might be exempt, that his soul might remain intact.

That Avis might grant him mercy from the Fading.

He had not been forced into isolation as punishment for a crime, but he had been judged, nevertheless. Judged, and found wanting.

As it turned out, dying felt less like actually _dying_ and more like being very slowly _consumed,_ devoured by everything and nothing, all at once.

The only benefit, he had decided, was that it brought quite a lot of things into perspective.

When Samantha had pulled him out of his medically induced coma, her first words to him had been:

“You are not going to die, today.”

And, Avis help him, he had believed her.

He hadn’t known it, at the time, but over the next four weeks he had come to the well-informed, if somewhat grudging, conclusion that when Samantha made up her mind about something, there was simply no denying her. She would bend the very rules of the universe to get what she wanted.

And being the sole recipient of that pure, unwavering determination had felt…

Well, it had felt rather like being loved.

He knew, of course, that she did not love him. He didn’t love her, either, not in any real sense of the word. But that did not matter.

His soul had recognized something about Samantha that his mind simply could not quantify.

And whatever that ‘something’ was… it had healed him.

Granted, he was not exactly _well_. His body was severely emaciated, his organs were weak and damaged, and his energy was virtually nonexistent. But in the end, his physical form was inconsequential.

Somehow, Samantha had saved him.

And as he stared down at her lifeless form, and timed stretched around him and before him, endless and infinite and filled with a strange, echoing silence…

He wondered if he could have saved her, as well.

His hearts clenched in his chest, and he grit his teeth, ruthlessly fighting against the heavy swell of regret that threatened to rise up within him.

Mourning her was pointless; it was, in fact, borderline _sacrilegious_. Humans did not have souls. They did not bear the blessing of Avis, and the promise of His mercy.

Samantha was dead. But in truth, she had never actually been  _alive_ to begin with.

In the end, she was as she had always been: empty and hollow.

Thalon turned his back to her, and faced his brother.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I live.”


	3. Bleeding Wounds

**[VARIK]**

Two months of tireless searching had brought him to this point. Two months of seeking, and hunting, and tracking. Two months of poring over Union encryptions and communication frequencies, of sleepless nights and tasteless meals.  
  
It had felt like a lifetime, but finally he had arrived on Hanara, a cold, rocky planet with no viable resources and a Union research base so classified it was unlisted in almost every Union database in existence.  
  
He had come here to finish what he had started. He had come here to find his brother's body, and bring it home to their mother.

When Varik crossed the medbay and pulled Thalon into a tight embrace, it finally hit him.  
  
He was alive. Thalon was _alive_. It was impossible, and it was unthinkable, and it was a miracle.  
  
And for the first time in two months, Varik felt as if he could breathe again.

“How?” he demanded, stepping back to stare at Thalon with wide eyes. “How is this possible?”

The look Thalon gave him was so venomous that Varik actually took a step back.

“The answer to that question is lying on the floor behind you,” Thalon said.

Varik glanced over at the human, sprawled out on the floor, pale and unmoving.  
  
He frowned. Had this creature somehow stumbled upon a cure?

Impossible. Krill scientists had been researching the Fading for hundreds of years, and had come no closer to solving the problem in that time. The chances of some scaleless, soulless little biped miraculously developing a remedy to the most fatal disease in Krill history in a matter of weeks was laughable, to say the least.

“It matters not,” he said, turning back to his brother with a dismissive wave. “You will be home, soon enough. Can you walk?”

Thalon growled, low in his chest. “You question my strength?”

“No.” Varik grinned. “I am not a fool. But I have no intention of letting you kill yourself a second time.” He jerked his head at Kish and Batal, and the two soldiers stepped forward, slinging their phasers over their shoulders and placing themselves on either side of the smaller Krill.

Thalon grumbled, but he allowed both men to hook their arms around his back. As they helped him towards the door, he shot Varik a dark look.

“I do not appreciate being minded like a feeble old woman, Varik.”

“Scold me all you want once we’re back on the _Maran_ ,” Varik replied, turning away. “Right now, our priority is getting you off this blasted rock in one piece.”

Perhaps it was his joy at finding Thalon alive that made him drop his guard, or perhaps it was the overwhelming sense of relief; he’d been given a second chance, an opportunity to remedy the mistake he had made, the mistake that had cost him his brother’s life.

But, in the end, the source of his carelessness was irrelevant. It did not change the result.

When he stepped out into the hallway, a blast of light seared his vision, and a phaserbolt slammed into his shoulder. He fell back against the wall with a grunt of pain, but before his mind had a chance to assess the damage, his training kicked in.

He didn’t try to dive for cover. He faced his enemy full on, lifted his weapon, and opened fire.

One of the humans dropped without a sound, but his two companions ducked back around the corner, cursing and shouting.

Varik bit back a snarl, rushing forward to retain the advantage, and took them both down with brutal efficiency. Further down the corridor, he could hear the sound of footsteps and voices, and the howling wind of the storm outside.

He turned back, gritting his teeth against the searing pain in his shoulder. Kish and Batal were still waiting in the medbay, but Livra and Erezar had already started towards him.

He waved them back. “Get to the ship. We are running out of time.”

They nodded and spun on their heels, taking point as Kish and Batal followed behind them, carefully supporting Thalon.

Varik brought up the rear, growling curses under his breath. When they got into orbit, he was going to personally see to the destruction of this miserable, Avisforsaken little outpost. He would wipe it off Hanara’s map.

The rage burned hotter as they made their way through the dim, red-lit corridors, stoked by the pain of his wound until it was a roaring furnace in his chest, blinding him to everything but the promise of escape.

The second shot took him in the leg. He roared, giving voice to his fury as he spun to face his enemy. A handful of humans in military uniform clustered together at the entry to the main hangar, using the massive doorway as cover.

Varik picked off two of them before they had the chance to draw back, and Erezar caught a third in the arm. Kish and Batal flattened Thalon against the wall, using their bodies as shields to protect him from incoming blasts.

Varik fired another round of phaserblasts and then turned.

“Keep going,” he snarled.

Erezar hesitated. “But, my lord…”

The third shot hit him square in the center of his chest.

He staggered back against the wall of the corridor. The plate of his armor caught the worst of the heat, but the impact of the blast itself crushed the air from his lungs.

He fired blindly, spraying the hangar door with phaserbolts, but no return fire rained down upon them in the minutes that followed.

When he finally managed to suck in a gasping breath, he coughed, and his ribs screamed in protest.

Erezar knelt beside him, grabbing his arm to haul him to his feet.

“ _Enough_.” Varik grit his teeth against the taste of blood and shoved Erezar away.

He tried to stand, and made it halfway to his feet before his body gave out on him, and he slumped back to the floor with a hiss of pain.

“Get to the ship,” he commanded. “I will cover you.”

“ _No_ ,” Thalon snarled, struggling behind the shield of his guards. “I will not leave you behind!”

Varik lifted his head.

“You did not leave me behind, little brother,” he said in a calm voice. "I chose to stay."

He glanced at Kish and jerked his chin, and Kish nodded. Together, the two men hoisted Thalon up and carried him away, ignoring his cursing and thrashing.

Livra followed, but Erezar hesitated, glancing at the hangar door.

“There are four of them left,” he said.

Varik spat vibrant blue blood onto the floor and grinned. “It will be a good fight, then.”

Erezar paused. And then he squared his shoulders and crossed his right arm over his chest in salute.

“It has been an honor, my lord,” he said quietly.

Varik froze.

He had never, in his long life, thought to hear a soldier’s farewell. The words had seemed so… distant. Not meant for him.

“Your job is not finished, warrior,” he growled, spearing Erezar with a sharp look. “And neither is mine.” He paused and jerked his chin. “Go.”

As Erezar’s footsteps faded beneath the sound of the bitter wind, howling beyond the hangar doors, Varik closed his eyes and forced himself to be calm, despite the searing agony that tore through his chest with every breath.

 _Avis, see my brother safely home,_ he prayed. _Do not let my death be in vain._


	4. Burning Silence

**[SAMANTHA]**

At first, there was only pain. It consumed her, filling every atom in her being. There was nothing else, nothing in existence.

Only pain. And darkness.

Then, slowly, the pain began to change. It didn’t fadeso much as it _collapsed_ like a dying star, feeding in on itself until it focused down to a single point, a deep, white-hot throb of agony in her left arm.

She opened her eyes, and found herself staring up at an endless gray sky, vast and dim, and pulsing with red.

No, not gray sky. Gray _tiles_.

She was staring up at the ceiling of the medbay.

Which meant she wasn’t dead.

Her brain acknowledged this statement with surprising calm. If she wasn’t dead, that meant she was still on Hanara.

If she was still on Hanara, that meant she was running out of time.

Quiet voices pierced through the dim haze of her mind, and she struggled to turn her head, where she found two blurry shadows standing in the doorway, arguing under their breath.

“…can’t just leave her here, she’s injured!”

She knew that voice. That was… L’tek, her Retuvian medical assistant.

“She’ll only slow us down,” the second voice replied. She knew that one, too. It was Caleb, her human assistant. “You heard the Commander; if we don’t get to the hangar in the next three minutes, they’re leaving without us.”

_Well_ , Sam thought drowsily, _fuck you, too, Caleb._

“I can carry her,” L’tek said desperately.

Caleb made a disgusted noise, and his shadow began to move away. “Then you can die with her.”

L’tek’s shadow hovered in the doorway, and Sam waited, struggling to keep her eyes open.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

And then he was gone.

And she was alone.

As the minutes ticked by in silence, broken only by the distant howl of the typhoon, Sam’s body began to return to her. Her sight cleared. Her breathing deepened. She wasn’t dead. Somehow, by some miracle, she wasn’t dead.

But if she stayed on this station, she would be.

Slowly, and with great effort, she started to push herself up into a sitting position.

Pain screamed up her left arm, and she screamed in response and collapsed back to the floor with a _thud_.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she gasped, cradling her hand to her chest. Broken. Very broken. She tried again, with only her right arm, this time, and managed to heave herself upright and lean back against the wall, gasping for breath.

After a moment, she risked a quick glance down at her wrist.

Her biolink blinked calmly at her from beneath the massive, swollen bruise that encircled her arm.

“Holy shit, you’re still here,” she whispered, staring at the little blue dot as it pulsed in time with her heart.

The biolink had been a gift, bestowed upon her six months earlier by a very grateful Horbalak crime lord. It was a masterpiece of technological innovation, but it was not indestructible. It should have shattered along with her bones.

When she queried its history, it responded by activating a small quantum field that glowed to life around her arm, shimmering and pulsing with golden energy.

Well, that explained why she wasn’t dead, at least. Her biolink had saved her.

“Good boy,” she whispered. The biolink did not respond. It wouldn’t, though. It was a marvel, far beyond its time, but it was not an AI.

At least, she didn't  _think_ it was...

Sam struggled to her feet and stumbled over to the medical array, rummaging through the compartments until she found a small dermabrace. She clamped it over her wrist and initiated the startup process, and then she reached under her desk and pulled out the duffel bag she always kept in her office. It had a change of clothes and a small bag filled with toiletries, for when she slept in the medbay. She grabbed an emergency medkit from the storage compartment by the main medical array and stuffed it into the bag. When she saw her phaser laying on the ground, she hesitated.  
  
But not for long. Into the bag it went, alongside the medkit.

The hallways were empty as she made her way towards the hangar. She didn’t bother carrying her phaser; the storm was in full force, by now, and Caleb had already made it perfectly clear that she was the last one left on the station.

As she rounded the corner by the mess hall, the lights flickered, and then failed, and for a brief, terrifying moment, Sam was plunged into darkness. She stood frozen in place as the wind rose to a dull, distant roar all around her.

When the power returned, she released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, and started forward again.

Ice typhoons were astronomically rare on Hanara. Rare enough that the Union hadn’t bothered burying the station’s generators. They’d looked at the cost, and looked at the statistical probability analyses, and they’d shrugged their shoulders and slapped together a half-assed evac plan.

At first, she was too busy cursing hypothetical Union actuaries to notice the dark figure slumped against the wall across from the hangar bay.

Then, when she _did_ notice him, she yelped and stumbled back, jamming her hand into her bag in search of her phaser.

The Krill looked up, his eyes glinting red in the dim glow of the emergency lights. When he caught sight of her, he grinned.

“You,” he said with deep, ragged chuckle. “Of course it would be you.”

Sam froze.

_Please._

Her fingers curled around the smooth grip of the phaser. Tightened.

He’d done nothing to stop the soldier who shot her. He’d watched her lower her weapon, and then he’d watched her die.

_Samantha, please._

She released her white-knuckled grip on the weapon and turned away.

And then stopped.

All she had to do was open the hangar door. That was it. It would take less than a second, and she would be free. She could turn away from him, just as he had turned away from her. She could leave him here to die.

_He is my brother._

Her fingers came to rest on the smooth plastic case of her medkit.

Before she had time to talk herself out of it, she unlatched the kit and pulled a small blue-capped syringe from her bag. She turned on her heel and tossed it in his direction.

He caught it with ease, but eyed it as if it might suddenly spring to life and bite him.

“Low-grade nerveblock,” she said, her voice clipped. “It won’t completely kill the pain but it’ll give you full range of motion.”

That wary gaze shifted to her, and he furrowed his eyeridges and frowned. The syringe remained clasped in his hand, and his eyes remained fixed on her, dark and suspicious.

Sam made a frustrated, impatient noise in her throat.

“Do you _want_ to die here?” she demanded.

A muscle in his jaw twitched as he clenched his teeth. He lifted his chin.

“No,” he said.

“Then do as I fucking say.” She didn’t wait for his response. She turned and slammed her palm against the hangar door's entry panel and stepped through.


	5. Fading Screams

**[SAMANTHA]**  
  
The bodies she found just inside the door did not surprise her; the Krill had obviously been shot by _someone_.

The fact that the bodies were frozen solid and covered in a thin layer of glittering frost, however…

That _did_ surprise her.

She lifted her gaze.  
  
The shimmering light of the station's deflector shield cast an eerie golden glow over the frozen tableau of horror that stretched out before her.

The last evac ship sat in the middle of the hangar, silent and dark. Two figures stood just a few feet from the ship's ramp, encased in a thin layer of ice, their arms outstretched.  
  
Clawing. Fighting. Reaching desperately towards the ship.

Beneath the ice, Sam recognized the vivid cobalt hue of Retuvian skin.

_L’tek._

“Oh, god.” Her hand flew to her mouth, and she stumbled back, and instantly collided with a solid wall of heat and armor.

The Krill grunted and caught her, his grip viciously tight on her arms. He released her the moment she found her feet, and stepped away.

Sam rounded on him. “What happened?”

His gaze was dark and cold as he scanned the silent hangar.

“The station sealed the interior doors when the power failed,” he said, casting a wary glance at the swirling chaos beyond the station's shields. “I did not see what happened after that."  
  
"The deflector failed," Sam said, her voice thready and faint. "It let the storm in."  
  
The Krill was silent for a moment, frowning thoughtfully.

"Strange," he said, "that I did not hear them scream."

“Oh, fuck." Sam bent over, bracing her hands on her knees. Her stomach clenched. Deep breaths. Deep, slow breaths. She grit her teeth and gave herself ten seconds to control the sudden swell of nausea rising within her.

Ten seconds wasn’t enough. Her blood pounded through her head, and a faint buzzing noise was rising in her hears.

Dead. They were dead. The last of the station’s crew were now buried in coffins made of ice and snow. And they’d had no warning, no time to prepare. How? What could possibly…?

She straightened abruptly, her nausea fading beneath a searing flash of ice-cold panic.

“Stratospheric downdraft,” she whispered. If the storm had reached the upper atmosphere, it was only a matter of time before the generators failed. “We have to leave. Now.”

The Krill stared at her.

“Yes,” he said calmly. “That would be wise.”

She turned, scanning the hangar. The evac ship was not large, but it was bulky, its hull and engines reinforced with dichromium plates to protect it against hazardous environments. The station’s two local shuttles had been shoved back against the far wall to make room for it.

One of them was covered in the same foot-thick sheet of ice that had imprisoned Caleb and L’tek.

The other, however, had been sheltered from the worst of the blast by the evac ship. Sam nodded at it and started forward, moving carefully down the ramp and across the ice.

Sleet crunched beneath her boots, and she kept her gaze firmly focused on the shuttle as she passed the frozen corpses of the men who had left her for dead. There was nothing she could do for them, now; even if she’d had the tech to revive them, it would have taken hours to cut them free from the ice.

Sam didn’t have hours. She might not even have minutes.

As she crossed the hangar, Sam unlatched the dermabrace from her left arm and stuffed it into her bag. Her biolink gave an unhappy blip in protest; her bones were not yet fully healed. But she would need both hands to fly the shuttle through the storm.

As she stepped up the shuttle ramp, she tossed her bag into the storage compartment underneath the matter synthesizer. She slid into the pilot’s chair and pulled the harness over her shoulders.

The Krill’s heavy footsteps echoed in the tiny ship as he moved forward and took the chair to her right, scanning the control panel with a deep frown.

“This vessel is not spaceworthy."

“It doesn’t need to be,” Sam said. “It just needs to get us out of here.”

She sent a neural command to her biolink to begin interfacing with the shuttle’s mainframe, and diverted most of the power to heating the hull so that any remaining ice would melt away.

“And where are we to go?” the Krill demanded. “Our systems indicated that the storm will engulf the entire planet within seventy-two hours.”

“There are dozens of Istari mining outposts scattered across Hanara.” Sam reached up to initiate primary thrusters and flinched as a bolt of pain speared her left wrist. “They buried their generators deep underground. If we can get to one, we’ll be safe.”

“If your people had built this station properly, we would already be safe,” he said with a growl.

Sam huffed a bitter, humorless laugh as the shuttle hummed to life around them.

“I’ll be sure to file a formal complaint with Union Engineering, should we survive.” She glanced over at him, eyeing the plasma burns on his chest, shoulder, and leg.

He had to be in incredible pain, and yet he had not uttered a single word of complaint.

“Strap in,” she said, turning back to the control panel. “This is going to be rough."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I don't know shit about weather, so I both technobabbled AND weatherbabbled in this chapter. It was fun. :)


	6. Chasing Death

**[VARIK]**

Like any spacefaring species, the Krill were no strangers to vertigo. Varik had spent years training his body to adjust to sudden changes in pressure, thrust, and gyroscopic spin.

But the first time the shuttle hit a pocket of dead air and plummeted nearly a hundred feet within a matter of seconds, Varik decided that his training had not been _nearly_ comprehensive enough. He made a mental note to report this deficiency to his superiors, and then, with great effort, he willed his stomach to crawl back down his throat and turned his attention to the human sitting next to him, in whose tiny hands both of their lives currently rested.

“Our thrusters cannot compensate for the changes in wind speed,” he growled.

She nodded, but her focus did not waver from the control panel. “I’m working on it. Give me a minute.”

Another draft slammed against the ship, pushing them upwards so quickly the shuttle’s internal gravity faltered, and all the blood rushed out of Varik’s head.

“Shit,” the human said in an admirably calm voice. “We’re caught inside a hypercell. If we can get beyond it, I should be able to–”  
  
A third blast hit the shuttle, and the thrusters failed. The ship rolled, and the sound of fabric tearing reached Varik’s ringing ears just as the human went flying.

He didn’t think, he just reached out and grabbed her around the waist, yanking her back against his chest as the world tilted and pitched around them. He closed his eyes, gritting his teeth against both the nauseating vertigo and the searing, throbbing pain of his wounds.

A minute, or perhaps an eternity, later, the ship’s thrusters kicked back on, and the cabin steadied itself.

“Shit, I have to…” the human struggled against his grip, and her elbow slammed into his shoulder. He released her with a snarl, and she fell to the floor in a graceless heap.

“Ouch,” she mumbled. She glanced up at him, and her expression shifted from anger, to surprise, to chagrin in an astonishingly short amount of time.

“Right,” she said quickly, pushing herself to her feet. “Ah... thank you.”

Varik nodded.

She slid back into her seat, frowning at the tattered remains of the harness.

"Never seen one fail like that before," she muttered. "Must have been defective."

“Be sure to mention that in your official complaint,” he said in a flat voice.

The human snorted a laugh, and then her eyes fixed on the control panel and she froze.

“Oh, shit,” she whispered. Her hands flew across the panel, and a moment later, she let out a flurry of curses so colorful his translator glitched, fumbling consonants and vowels in his mind. She turned to him with wide, desperate eyes.

“I’ve lost navigation and ground scanners. Please tell me you having a commlink on you.”

Varik pulled the small black device from his belt, but when she reached for it, he yanked it back with a scowl.

“What…” she stared at him for a moment, and then frowned. “Let me see it. 

“No.” 

“I’ll give it back!” 

_“No.”_

She scrubbed her hands over her face with a heavy, disgusted sigh and turned back to the control panel.

“Fine,” she said, her voice clipped. “The outposts are reinforced with dichromium hull plates; adjust your scanner frequency and set the range for a twenty mile radius.”

Varik flipped open his commlink and adjusted his settings, and watched as a faint, green light began to flicker at the edge of the little screen.

“Sensor efficiency is reduced, but my scanners are picking up a faint reading, ten miles to the north.”

The human nodded. “That’s the one I was heading towards before I lost signal. Give me a heading.  

“Adjust–” Another current of wind slammed into the ship, and Varik’s harness dug into his wounded shoulder as he was thrown forward. He snarled a curse, holding his commlink in a death grip as the thrusters struggled to level the shuttle.

The human had managed to brace herself against the control panel, and when she turned back to him, she was cradling her left arm against her chest, and her face was white with pain.

She said nothing. Her eyes slid down his body, and her jaw muscles clenched. She reached across him and pulled a small plastic container from a compartment by his right leg.

“Nerveblock,” she said, her voice tight. “You know what it looks like.”

Varik dug through the medkit until he came up with two blue-capped syringes, identical to the one she had thrown at him, earlier. He handed one to her, and watched as she pulled the cap off with her teeth and jammed the long needle directly into her bicep.

Varik did the same, biting back a sigh of relief as he returned his attention to his commlink.

“Adjust bearing by twelve degrees to the left.” He paused. “The beacon is growing stronger.”

The human let out a sharp breath of relief.

“My biolink just picked up the signal.” She peered down at her control panel. “Istari Outpost Alpha-One-Zero. The main grid is offline, but the station is running on standby power. We’re coming up on it, now.”

Silence fell as they both stared through the viewport, struggling to see beyond the thick, swirling clouds of snow and ice. Varik sent Avis a silent prayer of thanks for the soundproof hull. He would not have liked to be able to hear the endless roar of the wind that had tossed them about like a raft in a raging sea.

Between thick flurries of snow, the outpost slowly came into view, a semi-circular black bunker, set into the side of a sheer mountain cliff. The landing area was concealed beneath a large, snow-covered dome atop the base.

“Shit,” the human muttered.

Varik glanced over at her. She was quite fond of that word. “What is it?”

“The landing pad is sealed. It can only be opened by remote code, sent from offworld. _Shit_.”

Varik paused. “Is there another way in?”

She was quiet for a moment, scanning a series of documents that slid rapidly across her screen. Finally, she nodded.  
  
“A service door located beneath the outpost.” She glanced up at him. “If we can get to it, I should be able to hack the panel with my biolink.”

“Do it.”

She hesitated. “It’s… not that simple. Rotations from the hypercell are sucking stratospheric downdrafts to the surface, and without the shuttle’s scanner, I can’t accurately track the path of individual micropressure systems.”

Varik stared at her. “What language are you speaking?”

The human blinked at him, and her lips curled in a sheepish smile.

“It’s cold as fuck,” she said. “If we get hit by the same winds that keep rolling the ship, we’ll be killed instantly.”

Varik was quiet for a long moment, remembering the looks of frozen terror on the faces of the humans back on the science station. If it happened, it would be quick. He supposed he should take some small measure of comfort in that, but he found that he couldn’t.

He’d expected to die on that Union station. The human had given him a second chance.

No. If he was going to die, he was going to do it honorably, and that meant that he must acknowledge the truth that he had been determinedly ignoring since the moment he'd first laid eyes on her.  
  
He had come to Hanara expecting to find his brother's corpse.

The human had, in actuality, given him _two_ second chances.  
  
He owed her more than he could ever repay, and though he had absolutely no intention of telling _her_ that, he would not dishonor her by wasting the chances she had given him.

He unclasped the harness and stood, leaning over the control panel as he scanned the swirling chaos of ice and snow and bitter cold that stood between them and safety. After a moment, he glanced over his shoulder and caught her gaze and lifted one eyeridge at her.

“Then I suggest we move quickly.”

* * *

**[SAMANTHA]**

Sam eyed her Krill companion warily. The faintest hint of a smile curled his thin lips, though his black eyes were as sharp and cold as ever. She hesitated. Was he having an adverse reaction to the Nerveblock? Was his cognitive reasoning impaired?

Had he lost his goddamn mind?

She sighed. Did it matter? Either way, he was right. They had no other choice.

Sam guided the shuttle under the bunker and set it down on a small, rocky ledge that jutted out between the massive anchors that held the outpost in place. The service door was fifty feet away, set deep into the mountain. And all that stood between them and that door was a tunnel of empty air that could kill them in an instant, if the wind shifted just right.

Sam stood and moved to the back of the shuttle, pulling a set of hyperinsulated emergency uniforms out of the storage compartment. The Krill followed, and watched with expressionless eyes as she pulled the silvery jacket around her shoulders.

“Want one?” she asked, gesturing towards the second uniform.

“No.”

Sam shrugged, and then hesitated, glancing at his leg.

“Are you sure you can do this?”

His glittering black eyes narrowed to slits.

“You question my strength?” he demanded.

“I question your injury,” she said as she zipped up her jacket. “I’m not strong enough to carry you, if you fall.”

“If it comes to that,” he said, a growl threading his voice, “then I would prefer to die.”

Sam sighed and slung her bag over her shoulder. She turned to the shuttle door and took a deep, calming breath.

It didn’t help.

“Ready?” she murmured.

“Yes,” he replied.

Before she could talk herself out of it, Sam punched the emergency release latch and bolted.

The cold didn’t hit her so much as it _consumed_ her. Too much for her body to register on a scale of hot and cold, her nerves instead conveyed the information in the form of pain, and she gasped, her body curling in on itself without her permission. All she wanted was to turn and run back into the shuttle. Every atom in her body screamed at her to do it.

A pale figure appeared beside her, black eyes glinting in the dim light of the service tunnel. One big, warm hand splayed against her back and pushed her forward.

_“Move.”_

He turned away, and she forced herself to follow. The pain was still there, but now it was encapsulated in a layer of icy numbness and flowed up from her limbs, creeping towards her core.

_Don’t stop. Don’t stop. If you stop, you die._

She might die, anyway. A blast of air from the upper atmosphere would freeze every cell in her body in half a second.

She focused on the Krill’s back and kept running.

The round metal service hatch loomed up out of the darkness, and Sam activated her biolink as she yanked open the access panel.

Her biolink instantly rerouted power to the panel, and started working to break the firewall. Every second that passed felt like an eternity of ice and pain. Every howl and shriek of wind made her heart squeeze tighter in her chest.

The Krill growled, low in his throat. “Something is coming.”

She didn’t want to look. If she looked she would panic.

“Expand shuttle deflectors,” she hissed. Her biolink understood mental commands, but words felt more powerful, more _useful_ , and her mind was in a state of utter chaos at the moment.

The blue light on her wrist flickered green, and a faint golden glow filled the tunnel, throwing their shadows across the door.

“Hurry,” she whispered. “Please hurry.”

Her biolink gave a quiet blip of acknowledgement. Sam grit her teeth and hazarded a glance over her shoulder.

The deflector had not expanded enough to completely seal the tunnel, but it was holding back the worst of the wind. As she watched, small tendrils of ice began to creep their way past the glowing energy shield, curling and spreading like vines through the tunnel.

“We are running out of time,” the Krill said. Sam fought the urge to snap at him. It wasn’t fair. How could he sound so fucking _calm?_ He should be freaking out, just like she was. After all, wasn’t that what normal people did when faced with death?

But, then, he wasn’t normal, was he? He was a warrior. He had been trained to be calm in situations like this. How many times had he faced death in his life? How many times had he faced it _today?_

Sam stepped closer to him, drawn by an instinctive, overwhelming urge to feel the warmth of another person, to feel a little bit less _alone_.

If he noticed her movement towards him, he gave no indication. He simply stood there, calm and still, watching as death clawed its way down the tunnel towards them.

The deflector’s warm, golden light began to flicker.

Sam made a noise in her throat, half-whimper, half-sob. She did not want to die here, buried in ice and darkness, her arms stretched out towards the lost hope of her salvation.

She reached out blindly and grabbed the Krill’s hand.

He stiffened, but he did not turn to look at her. His focus remained on the end of the tunnel, where the golden light was beginning to fade.

Silently, he laced his gloved fingers with hers and squeezed.

 _Be strong_  

Was that her voice? His? She couldn’t tell. The wind was screaming, and the darkness was growing, and death was coming. She couldn’t tell.

 _Be calm._  
  
She grit her teeth and turned to look at the door. Open. Please. She did not want to die, today.

 _You are not going to die, today._  

The panel beeped happily, flickering to life, and the door slid open.  

Sam did not think. She tightened her grip on the Krill’s hand and threw herself across the threshold, dragging him along with her.

The golden light of the shuttle’s deflector flickered and disappeared, and the interior door panel shrieked an alarm, piercing through the howling storm.

The door slammed shut behind them, coated in a thin layer of crackling ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still working on getting back into the flow of writing, so pacing is a little wonky. If you see anything that can be improved, I am open to friendly criticism. Thanks for playing with my brainmonkeys, y'all.


	7. Losing Time

**[SAMANTHA]**

Sam’s legs gave out beneath her. Unfortunately, she still had a death grip on the Krill’s hand, and the two of them went down in a tangle of furious curses and flailing limbs.

“Ouch,” she muttered, wincing as his armor dug into her back.

“Indeed,” the Krill replied. He lifted himself off her with a grunt.

Sam sat up slowly, checking her limbs for injury, and winced as a white-hot bolt pain lanced up her arm. Warm liquid slipped between her fingers, and she grit her teeth, scanning her body for injury.

The service area was dimly lit by a row of yellow lights that lined the perimeter of the ceiling, and when she saw the blood that covered her arm, it took her a moment to realize that that it was deep blue, instead of red.

“What…” she glanced up, eyes wide. “You’re bleeding.”

“I am aware.” The Krill was kneeling on the floor beside her, his hands curled into tight fists at his sides. Blood wept from the wounds in his leg and his shoulder, and his breaths came sharp and ragged, loud in the oppressive silence of the room.

Shit. The phaser wounds would have been cauterized on impact. They must have torn open when she'd dragged him to the floor. This was her fault.

Sam stood. “We need to get you to the medbay. Can you walk?”

His eyes flashed up to hers, and his lips drew back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

“Question my strength again, human,” he challenged.

With great effort, Sam bit back an angry retort; he wasn’t the first patient whose ego was so laughably fragile that even the smallest hint of weakness sent him flying into a rage. But even battered, bleeding, and in pain, he was still ten times stronger than her, and Sam might not like his attitude, but she also had a very well-developed sense of self-preservation.

She grit her teeth and forced her voice to remain even. “My biolink has already integrated itself into the station’s computer system. It's working on getting full power back to the outpost." She took a deep, calming breath and stood.  _Focus._ She could barely think beyond the roaring of the wind, just beyond that frosted door. "We’re safe from the storm, but I need to stop that bleeding. Come with me.”

She turned and walked away without another word, and didn’t glance back to check that he was following; a tiny voice in the back of her head warned her that he may very well kill her if she did.

They stepped out of the lift and Sam sighed as she glanced around the room. The circular part of the outpost, the part they had seen from the shuttle, was the main living area, and it stretched out to her right, flanked by massive windows that showcased the swirling white chaos of the storm. It was quieter, up here. Better insulated. Thank god.  
  
A series of hallways ran deeper into the mountain, and Sam had to squint to read the Istari symbols in the dim light. She led him down the third hallway, where a pair of doors slid open to reveal the medbay. As she stepped into the room, a low, vibrating hum began to rumble through the station. The main generators had finally kicked on.  

Sam breathed a sigh of relief, and then quickly opened the holoscreen on her biolink, adjusting the light settings to keep her new companion from being burned to a crisp.

The dim light that suffused the room picked up the Krill’s pale, green-white skin, and he seemed to glow as he crossed the medbay and eased himself down onto the exam table.

Sam turned away to gather supplies onto a tray, and activated the medical array, watching the monitors flicker to life along the wall and above the desk with a satisfied smile.

She found the anesthetics compartment and scanned the neat rows of syringes until she found a xenocompliant opioid.

“Here,” she said, handing him a red-capped syringe. “It’s a high-grade local anesthetic. It’ll take care of the pain.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, he flicked off the cap and jammed the syringe directly into his leg wound. Sam’s eyebrows shot up, but she said nothing.

After a moment, the Krill breathed a quiet sigh of relief, and then turned his sharp gaze on her and frowned.

“I tire of your scrutiny, human.”

Sam blinked at him, and then pointedly fixed her gaze on his leg.

“Would you like me to tend to your wounds with my eyes closed?” she asked in a sharp voice.

He stared at her for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Sam did not shrink from his gaze. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited. Her wrist was still throbbing with pain, but his injuries were far more severe, and as such, remained her top priority. She couldn't risk a nerve block that might dull her motor skills.

A muscle in his jaw twitched.

“No,” he said gruffly.

Sam nodded. “Okay, then. Take off your armor.”

He stiffened. “Why?”

Sam closed her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. Her body ached, her wrist shot little bolts of agony up her arm with every beat of her heart, and her eyes felt like they were being squeezed into her skull, but she was  _not_  going to bludgeon her patient with a datapad. She wouldn’t. It was bad form.

No matter how much she wanted to, and no matter how much he deserved it.

“Do I really need to answer that question?” she asked in a clipped voice. “Or do you think you might be capable of setting aside your xenophobia for two _fucking_ seconds and allowing me to do my damn job?”

At the sound of his low growl, she opened her eyes. He rose quickly from the exam table, bristling with rage as he took a step towards her.

He only managed the one, though. Before he could take another step, he began to sway on his feet, and his growl melted into a wordless hiss of pain. Sam reached for him just as he fell back heavily onto the bed with a heavy _thud_.

“Stay back,” he barked, pinning her with dark, glittering eyes.

Sam hesitated. Fear skittered down her spine, and she grit her teeth as she struggled to suppress it. She’d dealt with plenty of ornery patients, in her time, and more than her fair share of tense situations. Hell, six months ago, she’d been kidnapped on her way home from work and flown halfway across the sector, where she'd been ordered at gunpoint to treat Norblhargh’s heart condition.  
  
She had seen fear, and panic, and rage, and distrust. But not once, in all her time as a doctor, had any of her patients looked at her with such open contempt.

Not even Thalon.

She grit her teeth and angrily pushed the thought away, curling her hands into fists and squaring her shoulders.

“No,” she said in a flat voice. “I’m going to help you, whether you like it or not.”

He bared his teeth at her, but he did not try to rise. Dark blue blood had begun to pool beneath his leg, and rivulets trickled down his left arm. She could see his strength fading before her eyes.  
  
“Why?” he demanded.

“Because Thalon would want me to,” she snapped, the last of her patience withering away beneath a swell of anger so hot and fierce it took her breath away. She didn’t want to think about Thalon, damn it. She didn’t want to remember. She didn’t want to relive that moment in the medbay, when she’d faced her death, and he had stood by and let it happen.

Christ. She’d thought they were _friends_.

The Krill went very still.

And then he sighed.

Without a word, he reached up and unclasped his breastplate, sliding it over his head and dropping it to the floor. His pauldrons and wrist bracers followed suit.  

The  _klatsarit_  he wore was similar to Thalon's, but thicker, sturdier, and heavily padded around his knees and elbows. It was also bigger, because, well...  _he_ was bigger.

The Krill lifted his head and frowned.

“I cannot lift my arm." 

“I’ll cut the fabric away where I need to.” Sam's voice was distant as she analyzed his injuries. The center of his shirt was singed; his armor had taken the worst of the hit, but the physical impact of a direct phaser blast was strong enough to shatter human bones. Krill, however, were far more resilient, and he wasn’t coughing up blood, so his lungs were safe, and his sternum probably wasn’t broken. He’d have a massive hematoma, though, and probably more than a few cracked ribs. The scans would show her the severity of it, soon enough.

The wound on his shoulder was moderately severe. It had been a glancing blow; his skin had been cauterized in a straight line across his bicep, but he’d torn the burn open during their escape.

His leg was the worst. He had no protective armor, there, only the thick fabric of his uniform, which was singed and torn and now soaked in blood.

Sam felt an eerie stillness settle over her, the same calm that always arose when she was faced with a severely injured patient.

“I’m going to need to do some initial scans to check for internal bleeding,” she said, leveling him with a hard look. “Then a pass with the microlaser to cauterize the open wounds, and a layer of skingel for the burns.”

He nodded.

Sam took a step forward, and hesitated.

“It won’t take long, but it’s going to hurt,” she said in a flat voice. “Try not to kill me.”

He stared at her for a moment, and then huffed a quiet laugh.

“I will do my best.”

* * *

**[VARIK]**

She was right. It hurt.

Even with the anesthetic, Varik could feel the tiny, vicious zap of the laser as it cauterized broken blood vessels beneath his skin. His hands gripped the edge of the exam table, claws digging deep into the padding as he grit his teeth and waited for the human to end her torment.

The volatile emotions he had sensed in her earlier were now gone, replaced with a calm so intense that Varik could feel it in the air, seeping into his skin. She wore gloves, but he could feel the heat of her skin as she carefully pulled away the fabric of his shirt to get to the edge of his wound.

He had to admit, she was good. It hurt like the black fires of the abyss, but it didn’t take long for her to finish with his shoulder and smooth a thin layer of skingel over the burn.

When she lowered her head to tend to his leg, however…

That was when he realized he had a problem.

It started slowly, hindered at first by the pain of the microlaser, but after a while, his body began to grow numb to it, and instead he was left with only the throbbing ache of his wounds.

And the dawning horror of his growing erection.

At first, he tried to tell himself that it was the medication. He was having some sort of reaction to it, surely. It wasn’t formulated for Krill biology. It might very well be toxic to him.

Well, obviously not _toxic_ but… Avis help him, _why was he getting so aroused?_

When she placed her gloved hand on his inner thigh, peeling back the fabric of his uniform, he received the answer to his question.

He did not like the answer to his question.

The human began to apply the skingel, and the strange, tingling sensation of the gel, combined with the gentle warmth of her touch, curled across his skin and slithered through his veins and then shot straight to his groin.

Varik bit back a snarl.

Impossible. Unthinkable. She was _human_.

No matter how many times he repeated these words in his mind, his body refused to listen. Because his body did not see a bad-tempered little alien with unnerving eyes and unnatural pink skin. His body saw a slender, well-proportioned female with skilled hands and unrelenting focus. He saw her head bent over his cock and felt her fingertips sliding across his thigh, leaving a trail of delicious, agonizing heat in her wake, and he  _burned._

It took everything he had to keep still as she finished her work. He held his breath for most of it, to the point where stars began to flash in his vision.

Luckily,  _blessedly,_ the human took no notice of the growing bulge of his erection. Her concentration remained fixed, unwavering, upon his injury.

He might have thanked Avis for this, but he imagined the blasphemy of such a prayer might very well damn his soul straight to the abyss.

Besides, he was far too busy cursing his wayward body for its betrayal. It was beyond repulsive. She was _human._

When she finally sat back, Varik instantly leaned down and grabbed his wrist brace, settling his forearms on his lap to block her view of his groin.

The human took no notice of this; she turned away, rubbing her eyes, and pulled up a holoscreen.  
  
“The bleeding has stopped,” she said around a yawn. “The skingel will take care of the rest. Give it a couple hours and you’ll be good to go.”

Varik frowned, his nonstop internal monologue of self-hatred momentarily interrupted by her strange command.

“Go where?”

The human turned, blinked at him, and smiled. “Nowhere, it’s a figure of speech.”

“Say what you mean,” he growled. “I have neither the time nor the patience to decipher nonsensical human idioms.”

She turned back to the screen. “You seem irritable,” she noted in a mild voice. “Are you in any pain? I can give you another dose of…”  
  
“I am _fine_ ,” Varik snapped.

She nodded. “I need to get some information to establish a baseline for any further treatment you may require. What's your name?”

He considered ignoring her. It seemed atrociously unfair that she continued to remain so blissfully unaware of what she had done to him. But the unnerving, misplaced desire had already begun to fade, subsumed beneath the blissful wave of _not pain_  that was slowly spreading through his limbs. Skingel worked wonders, and carried anti-inflammatory microbes that soothed his sore muscles and helped his body regenerate blood cells.

He took a deep, calming breath.

"My name is Varik."

She nodded. "Is your species prone to infection?"

“No.”

“Do you have any allergies?”

He paused. The faint flicker of amusement came out of nowhere, fueled perhaps by the strange medication she had given him, or by the purely selfish desire to make her feel as awkward as he had felt, moments earlier. Or perhaps by the fact that the blood flow had yet to completely return to his brain.

Varik huffed. “Does sunlight count?”

She turned to him, eyeing him warily. “Was… was that a joke?”

He ruthlessly smothered a grin, forcing his expression to remain utterly blank.

“Why?” he asked in a dry voice. “Do you find the thought of me being burned alive amusing?”

She let out a long, slow breath. “So… not a joke, then.”

“When I make a joke, human, I will be sure to inform you." 

She scowled at him. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to insult you, you’re just… kind of difficult to read.”  
  
That was a good thing. A _very_ good thing. If he’d been easy to read, she might have been able to see through the mask of pain, earlier, and discovered what he’d been trying so desperately to hide.

 _She’s human_.

“Then do not attempt to read me,” he growled.

She scrubbed her hands over her face, and Varik noted the dark shadows beneath her eyes. Was that normal for humans? It didn’t seem all that normal. After a moment, she sighed and leaned back, pinning him with weary eyes. She was cradling her left arm against her chest, and a flicker of something almost like remorse rose up within him as he remembered their first meeting.  
  
“Look, we’re stuck here together until this storm passes," she said quietly. "Can we just… call a truce? Please? There’s no reason for us to be at each other’s throats for the next two months.”

Varik frowned, struggling to decode her phrasing. “If I were at your _throat_ , you would not…”  
  
Wait.  
  
The oxygen in the room evaporated. The world shrank around him, blackness swirling in his vision as he struggled to remain upright.  
  
_Two months?!_


	8. Fighting Hope

**[SAM]**

Sam waited an extra ten minutes after the crashing and banging had stopped, just to be safe. When she poked her head out of the storage room, the chaos that greeted her made her heart sink. Most of the furniture in the living area was bolted to the floor, but random pieces of mining equipment had been pulled from storage compartments throughout the room and tossed about as if they were plastic toys instead of massive blocks of welded hypersteel.  
  
At least he’d moved to the living area before he started throwing his tantrum. Not that Sam could take any credit for that; she could only assume that somewhere, deeply buried beneath the blind seething rage that had overwhelmed him, he had still somehow retained the presence of mind to recognize the value of keeping the medbay intact and undamaged.

That was lucky, because when he’d bolted off the exam table with a roar so loud and furious that it vibrated the very air in her lungs, Sam’s brain had seized and every muscle in her body had locked up, rendering her completely paralyzed, and she’d been unable to do anything but stare at him as he tore out of the room and down the hall. 

Had he decided differently, she would have been helpless in the face of his rage. She wasn’t used to feeling helpless. She didn’t _like_ feeling helpless. It made her stomach clench and her heart twist in her chest. And it was that feeling that drove her lean further around the door of the storage room to survey the full extent of the damage.

Varik stood in the center of a maelstrom of destruction, shoulders heaving as he glared out the massive windows that stretched around the circular living area. He looked as if he was contemplating stepping outside to fight the storm, itself.

“Can I come out?” she asked in a tentative voice.

He whipped his head around, pinning her with eyes as dark and empty as the void of space.

“How proficient are you in hand-to-hand combat?” he demanded.

Sam blinked. “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’”

“Answer the question, human!”

“I’m not,” she said quickly. “I have no training at all. I mean… I punched a guy in a bar, once, but only because he was drunk and got handsy." 

Varik stared at her for a long, tense moment. “I need to fight something.”

Sam glanced around the room. “What… wholesale annihilation wasn’t enough?”

He glanced down at the debris by his feet and grunted, returning his gaze to her.

“Come here.”

“Oh, _hell_ no.” She retreated, pulling the door behind her, but before she could shut it, a set of pale, sharp claws curled around the edge and yanked it wide open again.  

Sam stumbled back with a curse, scanning the room for a weapon and finding nothing but flimsy plastic tubs filled with charging cords and dead datapads. She grit her teeth and glared at him as he approached. Despite the feral glint in his eyes, his steps were slow and measured.

Sam scowled up at him. “I am _not_ going to fight you.”

“You have little choice in the matter.”

“The fuck I don’t.” She jerked her chin up. “You saying you’re the type of guy who’d beat the shit out of me even if I refused to defend myself?”

His lips thinned.  
  
“Eventually," he growled, "you will fight back.” 

That casual, uncaring dismissal of her potential suffering sparked something inside her, a searing wave of heat and fury that caught fire in her heart and rose up through her chest and expanded, curling up along her spine. She straightened abruptly, sucking in a sharp breath through her teeth.

“Fuck you,” she said calmly.

The stillness that came over him was like the eye of a storm, silent and terrifying.

She didn’t close her eyes. She stared up at him without flinching, and waited for the first blow.

After a long moment, Varik crossed his arms over his chest and cocked his head.

“You would not survive it,” he said in a flat voice.  

Sam froze, unable to move, unable to breathe. Had… had he just…?

He sighed. “That was a joke."

The inferno within her sputtered and died. She felt like a deflating balloon, like all the fight in her had vanished in a rush of hot air. She choked on a strangled gasp, sucked in a deep, trembling breath, and slid to the floor in a boneless heap.

“I thought you were going to kill me,” she said, staring numbly at his boots.

“I am not going to kill you,” he replied, turning away. “I am going to train you.”

* * *

**[VARIK]**

“I don’t want to learn how to fight.”

Varik suppressed his growl as he lifted a large drill mechanism and carried it back over to its compartment. It felt heavier than it had when he’d first tossed it across the room, but that meant that his rage was fading, which was a good thing.  

He grit his teeth against the cold, heavy weight in his stomach. He should not have lost his temper like that. It was the sort of response one might expect from a petulant child, not a hardened warrior.

Had any of his students reacted in such a way, he’d have gotten them in a headlock and smothered the tantrum before it had a chance to take root. He should consider himself lucky that there had been no other Krill present to witness his outburst. He might have, if the fact that there were no other Krill present had not been the initial cause of his rage. But there were no Krill, here. There was only the human, who now stood in the center of the room with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at him with a mixture of wariness and defiance that reminded him of Thalon, for some odd reason.

He turned and picked up a shelving unit and shoved it back onto its brackets with a grunt. His entire body screamed in protest, and his wounds throbbed with faint, ghostly pain; had he damaged them again, already? A quick check indicated that his shoulder was not bleeding, but it was covered in a dark, mottled bruise. He had pushed himself too hard.  
  
And yet, not hard enough. The anger still thrummed through his body, deep and resonant like the chiming of the great black bells that rang high in the towers of the Amarnan cathedral. He had not completely spent his rage. Not yet. Not in the way he needed to.  
  
“You should _already_ know how to fight,” he said, turning to face the human. She took a step back from him, and he fought the urge to sigh, struggling to control the growl that kept trying to creep back into his voice. “How did you manage to become a Union officer without learning the basics of hand to hand combat?”

Despite her obvious fear, she scowled at him. What a strange creature. So conflicted. So… _stubborn_.  
  
“I’m not military,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m a civilian contractor.”

Varik frowned. “All humans are part of the Union.”

“Yes, but the Union is not _all_ military.” Her eyes tracked his face, and she must have found evidence of his disbelief, because she rolled her eyes – Varik suppressed a shudder at the unnerving sight – and sighed. “What, are you saying even your… your _librarians_ know how to fight?”

“Of course,” he said, appalled. “How else would they defend themselves in the event of an attack?”

She made that noise again, a strangled mixture of a laugh and a scream, and dropped into one of the chairs by the window. Varik turned away to shove the last of the drill mechanisms in place, and when he glanced back, he found her curled up like a frightened child with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.  
  
“This is insane,” she muttered.  
  
He searched his mind desperately, seeking some deeply buried well of patience, and found only swirling, seething darkness, instead.

“It is common sense,” he said through clenched teeth. “You will learn how to fight, as you should have done a long time ago.”

She was quiet for a long moment, and Varik took the opportunity to stretch his sore muscles, wincing as he pulled against the newly-healed skin on his shoulder.

“What if I suck at it?” she asked quietly.

He paused, frowning as he deciphered her words, and then huffed. “You will not… _suck_ at this.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I will be teaching you.” He turned and picked up an ore extractor with a grunt, carrying it over to the shelf from which he had pulled it.

“Pride comes before the fall,” the human muttered.

Varik turned to her with a scowl. “It is not pride, it is a statement of fact. There are five living masters of Tarat, and I am one of them; I have trained hundreds of Krill warriors in my time.”

The human’s blank stare made his palms itch to destroy something. “Tarat?”

He knelt and began coiling a heavy hypersteel chain around his arm. “The Krill holy art of hand-to-hand combat.”

Her stunned silence was not as blissful as it should have been. Perhaps because he could practically _hear_ her brain tumbling over itself.

His people did not know a great deal about the inner workings of the human mind. Mostly because they did not _need_ to know. Humans were not Krill, and therefore they had no soul. That was all the information his people required. What did it matter if humans spoke in idioms and peppered their speech with strange curses? How did it benefit them to understand human thought patterns or recognize their facial expressions and vocal cues?

It didn’t. Simple as that.

And while Varik, for the most part, tended to embrace this philosophy, he recognized the value in learning what he could about _this_ human in particular.

After all, he would be spending the rest of his life with her.

She was a strange combination of contradictory traits; at times both fearful and stubborn, determined but cautious, clever and yet _astonishingly_ naïve. But, most of all, she was smart.

“You want to teach me a sacred Krill fighting technique,” she said. It wasn’t inflected as a question, but the question was there, all the same.

Varik grit his teeth and bit back a sigh. “Yes.”

“Isn’t that… sacrilege?”

He threw the chain back into its compartment, where it made a loud, satisfying clang. _“Yes._ ”

“Then why…?”

He turned, stalking towards her with a deep growl. “Because destroying inanimate objects proved ineffective.”

She shrank back from him, wilting like a flower in the snow.

He stilled, curling his hands into fists, and forced himself to take several deep, calming breaths. His patience was gone. His rage, that deep, instinctive _need_ , was returning.

He had already pushed her, once. He had already seen the strength hidden beneath her strange, alien eyes.

In truth, he would never have attacked her, knowing that she could not defend herself. But when he had threatened her, she had risen to the challenge. She had pushed back.

Contradictions. 

“Close combat is a form of relaxation for my species,” he said in a measured voice. “I need to _fight_. Mindless destruction solves nothing.”

And he saw it once more, the moment of metamorphosis when her fear melted away beneath a scorching swell of deeply-buried fury, burning through every thread of panic and hesitation in her gaze until only the pure, unyielding abyss shined through.

Varik had encountered many different kinds of people in his long life. He knew a warrior when he saw one.

“Then why do your people kill everything they touch?” she demanded.

He straightened, drawing himself to his full height and clenching his jaw to hide the smile that threatened.

“I am not going to debate Krill edict with you,” he said. A new thought struck, and his eyes narrowed. Warrior, she may be, but she did not know it, yet. First, and foremost, she was a _scientist_. “I am offering you a chance to learn something that has not been shared with any other species in the history of our civilization. I suggest you take it.”

He turned away and started down the hall towards the sleeping quarters.

“Get some rest,” he ordered. “Your training begins in twelve hours.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that took so long. Life has been punching me in the metaphorical dick, lately. I'll try to keep to a schedule, from now on. New chapter every Friday, maybe? 
> 
> Sounds like a good thing to not hold your breath for. <3


	9. Running Blind

**[SAMANTHA]**

She was half-tempted to stay up all night, just to see how instructive Varik would be when faced with a stubborn, sulking, over-tired human female. But he might just kill her for that, and she’d never been the type to cut off her nose to spite her face.

Besides… she was curious.

Krill combat skills were legendary, and had long been viewed with awe and reluctant admiration. Until last night, she hadn’t even known it had a _name_. No one had.

And now, Sam stood in the dim light of the main living area, facing a master in this secret art.

She felt woefully insufficient for the task. Her body ached from the cold and the lingering bruises she had acquired during their escape. Her stomach was tied in knots, and she couldn’t seem to stop _fidgeting_.

Varik watched her from across the empty space. He had taken a plasmacutter to the furniture and dragged the chairs and tables to the perimeter of the room to create a makeshift practice ring.

Despite the gaping phaser holes in his clothing, which revealed one very large bicep and a… a _startling_ amount of well-muscled thigh, he looked perfectly confident, standing there with his shoulders back and his chin high. At ease. In his element.

_Comfortable._

Damn him.

“I have some concerns,” she said.

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Of course you do.”

“You’re a lot stronger than me.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She scowled and gestured to the storage compartments behind him. “That drill back there? The one you tossed across the room yesterday? I couldn’t lift that thing if I _tried_.”

“I am well aware of your physical inadequacy, human.”

Her unease evaporated, overtaken by the tumbling wave of anger and frustration that lay just beneath it.

“My name,” she bit out, “is _Samantha_.” Her hands curled into trembling fists at her sides, but when he started towards her, the swell of anger faltered and bled out of her body like…

Well, like blood.

She scrambled to get away, but he caught her by her wrists and hauled her back into the ring with effortless strength, holding her in place as she struggled in his grip. Was this what a mouse felt like beneath a cat’s paw? Twisting and straining, desperately reaching for freedom?

“Enough!” he barked. The sharpness in his voice cut through her panic like the bolt of a blaster rifle. "You are trapped in my jaws, _anatli_. Be still in the face of your enemy, and never let him see your fear.”

Her translator glitched on the word, and her biolink helpfully resolved this malfunction by supplying her mind with an image of a small, hairless rodent with four big, glassy eyes and six long, spindly limbs. How her biolink had managed to obtain information about the biological lifeforms that lived on a planet the Union hadn’t even seen in _person_ , Sam couldn’t begin to guess, but she got the meaning well enough, and a fresh surge of panic sent a burst of adrenaline rushing through her veins.

Varik growled, tightening his grip on her wrists.

“Be still!” he commanded.

Sam froze, baring her teeth in a silent snarl.

His grip did not ease, but something like approval glinted in his coal-black eyes.

“Good,” he said, his voice calm. “You must never admit defeat. When you are at the mercy of your enemy, remember this: be still, be silent, and _wait_.”

She waited. The heavy silence that fell between them was broken only by her ragged breathing.

She waited, biting back the whimper that clawed at her throat.

She waited, and no opportunity came. His grip remained unyielding, his gaze unwavering and intense. His breaths came slow and calm, and his strength did not falter, not even for an instant.

She glared up at him, hating him, hating herself. She was weak. _Useless_. She was easy enough prey to the men of her own species; when held at the mercy of a Krill warrior, she was utterly powerless.

But as she stood there, desperate and furious, something happened inside her, a strange sort of numbness that rolled through her limbs like the slow, deep chime of a cathedral bell.

The fear did not fade, and the fury did not falter, but something else rose from the depths of her soul, subsuming the panic as it swelled up within her until it sat at the very front of her mind, clear and bright and still.

She did not make a conscious effort to relax her body; it just happened, the tension in her muscles draining away in the face of this vast, inexplicable calm.

Varik hesitated, and for a fraction of an instant, his grip slackened.

The bubble of stillness inside her imploded, shattering into a million shards of light and color and then began to collapse. Time slowed, and everything shrank into a single point of impenetrable focus.

 _If you try to pull away, he will tighten his grip._ Was that her voice, whispering from the depths of the darkness in her mind? She couldn’t tell. _If you strike him with your legs, he will sweep them out from beneath you._

What, then, could she possibly do?

The focus shifted to his hands, and then to his wrists.

_Use his own body against him._

She did not try to pull away. Instead, she pushed _forward_. His wrists had been locked, but now he was forced to bend them back, just slightly.

It was enough.

She wrenched her arms outward, forcing his wrists to bend at an unnatural angle, and instead of stepping back, she moved  _forward_ , pressing her body flush against his. The the surreal bubble of stillness that had enveloped her gave her just enough time to register that he was warm, and strong, and  _surprised._  

The surprise did not last very long, and in an instant, he had her by the wrists again. His grip was tight enough that her biolink chirped in annoyance.  
  
_Now._

Sam drove her knee into his groin. He snarled, and though his grip did not ease, instinct drove him back, and he doubled over, sucking in a tense, strangled breath.

 _Again_.

Wait... again? What...?

At his full height, Varik stood more than a foot taller than her.

But now...

Oh.

She slammed her knee into his face with a triumphant cry, and finally,  _blessedly,_  his grip failed, and she tumbled backwards onto the floor.

_Free._

* * *

 

**[VARIK]**

At first, he was too blinded by pain to truly understand what had happened. And then, as the pain began to abate, and the stars in his vision faded, he felt a deep swell of laughter rising in his chest.

He had never intended to give her the opportunity to escape. The exercise was meant to teach students to conquer their fear instead of listening to its desperate pleas. They would wait, and grow anxious, and the fear would trick them into seeing an opening that did not exist, and they would pull away, or try to kick at his legs, and they would always, inevitably, find themselves lying flat on the floor, gasping for air.

But that was not what had just happened.

What had just happened _should not_ _have happened_.

His groin ached; his protective cartilage had softened during their standoff, allowing her blow to incapacitate him with far greater ease than it would have in any other situation. The question was  _why_. It made no sense. The plating only softened when he was aroused.

He was not aroused. He was  _absolutely not aroused._

Perhaps his mind had somehow interpreted the thrilling prospect of a fight to be a form of sexual desire? It would not be the first time, and in fact, casual sparring was a common precursor to mating among his kind. 

But she was not his kind.

And yet, here they were.

Varik pinched the bridge of his nose to stem the flow of blood and opened his eyes to stare down at the little human who had just bested him. And confused him. And nearly unmanned him.

His first instinct was to lash out in a blind attempt to soothe the raw, gaping wound in his pride, but such a response was beneath him, the kind of urge to which only an impetuous child would give in. Varik knew better.

His second instinct was to dispense praise, but he found he could not bring himself to utter the words.

And so, he fell back on logic.

“Your technique is sloppy,” he said, wiping the blood from his mouth with his sleeve. “In combat, the element of surprise will only work once. You waste it at your own peril.”

The human’s eyes were wide and round, and her face was almost as pale as his own. In all honesty, he had expected her to gloat, but the horror he saw in her expression held no trace of triumph or joy.

“I… I didn’t… oh, god.” She scrambled inelegantly to her feet, clutching her trembling hands to her stomach. “Oh, god, I am _so_ sorry. I'll get you a dermascanner.”

“I am fine,” he said, eyeing her with a wary frown. “You… do not look well.”

“Yeah, no shit.” She bent over and braced her hands on her knees as she sucked in deep, shuddering breaths. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

It took him a moment to decipher her words, but once he realized what she meant, he turned on his heel and crossed the room, stepping around the half-wall that separated the living area from the mess. The food synthesizer flickered awake at his touch.

He hesitated, staring at the wall panel. Why was he doing this? Why was he trying to… to _comfort_ her? She was not the first to have an adverse reaction to physical violence, and Varik was not one to coddle his students. Adrenaline sickness faded over time, as the body became inured to it. Had she been Krill, he would not have felt the need to help her through this.

Ah, but that was not a fair comparison, was it? After all, he had seen her face down five Krill warriors without blinking. He had watched her pilot her way through a storm made of ice and death, and she had not faltered once, neither during nor after these events. Had she been Krill, he would have been awed by her strength.

Avis save him. He was awed by it anyway.

Had she been Krill… his mind kept circling around those words and focusing on them, as if it they mattered. Had she been Krill, he would have requested that she join his crew on the _Marat,_ so that he could work alongside her. Had she been Krill, she would already have learned basic combat skills, and they could have sparred freely. And though he was not entirely sure he would have _needed_ to fight her, he certainly would have enjoyed it. She was built like a Krill, slender and curved in places that would fit so nicely in his hands. He would have enjoyed finding ways to pin her beneath him during their matches, to feel her body pressed beneath his, to feel the thrill rush through his blood as he claimed his victory.

His cock throbbed, and this time, it was not due to stomach-churning pain. Varik bit back a growl and shoved his treacherous thoughts to the back of his mind. She was not Krill, and so it did not matter what he might have done - what he _wanted_ to do.

And besides, it wasn’t the adrenaline that had made her sick. It was the fact that she had hurt him.

“Give me whatever herbal infusion is most commonly requested by ailing human females,” he ordered. After a beat, he added, “and whatever foodstuff with which it is normally paired.”

The synthesizer processed his request with a beep and then produced the items in a flare of blue light that made him flinch.

“Chai,” the computerized voice intoned, “and a vanilla scone.”

He picked up the tray and turned back. The human had curled herself into a tight ball on the floor. He set the tray before her, hesitated, and then sank into a sitting position across from her.

“Eat,” he commanded. “It will help.”

Her eyes were glazed, but she reached out with slow, mechanical movements and picked up the scone, taking a small, hesitant bite.

Her eyes slid closed, and she made a sound in her throat, a soft, breathy moan of pleasure.

Varik’s brain stuttered to a halt.

_Avis help him._

Noises like that were not meant for _food_. They were meant for a dark, private place, where they would not be overheard by prying ears. They were a song of need and desire, meant to be drawn out by the skilled touch of her mate.

His hearts stumbled, and a rush of heat flooded his limbs.

_She is human._

He came back to himself with an unpleasant jolt, muscles tensing as if his body sensed some unknown threat.

The human was physically inferior, and though she was quite possibly one of the most intelligent people he had ever met, her intelligence did not pose a direct threat to his safety.

But what if she posed a _different_ kind of threat? He had heard of several species that could exude a specific combination of pheromones designed to evoke intense sexual desire. Did humans possess this ability?

He stared at her, frozen in place as he considered these new, disastrous thoughts, and paired them with his earlier hesitation. _Had she been Krill…_

 _Did_ he find her attractive? She was small, but then, most humans were. Her face was smooth, and held no trace of ridges or spikes. The long, glossy… _fur_ on her head was the color of young _klatsa_ vines, a deep, rich brown that glinted red-gold in the dim light, and it was pulled back against her scalp, revealing the smooth dome of her skull. No ridges there, either. Without them, she looked weak and soft, and the pinkish hue of her skin gave her a sickly appearance.

Her eyes were disturbingly pale, her lips too full, her nose too small.

No, he decided. She may be built like a Krill female, but he felt no desire for her. She was far too strange to be beautiful. Far too… _alien._

The lingering thread of heat finally dissipated, and he breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

The human, for her part, remained blissfully unaware of his scrutiny. She continued to sip her tea, taking occasional bites of her scone while she stared sightlessly at the swirling white chaos of the storm beyond the window.

Varik frowned. That unnerving swell of desire had been triggered by her reaction to a small, golden-brown lump of carbohydrates. Setting aside his body’s response, the question had to be raised as to the source of her odd behavior.

Sustenance was provided to the Krill by the grace of Avis, and while it was always accepted from His hand with deference and gratitude, it was not recognized as a great source of rapture or bliss. It was food. It was meant to fuel their bodies to their holy war, and fuel their souls to their holy task.

And yet, this human had reacted to her scone the same way a Krill female might react to a lovebite from her mate.

Perhaps her species derived some sort of sexual pleasure from eating?

The human was frowning, now. As she unfolded her legs, she winced and sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth.

“My knee hurts,” she mumbled. It was already beginning to swell, and a deep, purple bruise was spreading beneath her skin.

Varik huffed. “I am not surprised. You broke my nose with it.” 

_Among other things._

Her eyes flashed wide. “I did?”

When he nodded, her face fell, and she dropped her head into her hands.

“Oh, god. I’m so sorry.”

“Do not apologize to me again,” he said, injecting a note of warning into his voice.

She lifted her head, eyeing him warily. “Why not?”

“Because your actions do not require forgiveness.” He stood, suddenly and inexplicably eager to put some distance between them. He couldn’t risk it; what if she made that _noise_ again?

“See to your injury,” he said as he turned away. “We will resume your training in an hour.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would the move that Sam used actually work in real life? idk. But hey, look, it's Friday and I did a new chapter. Yay! I'd love to hear what you think, if you happen to have the time and inclination. I hope y'all have a great weekend. <3


	10. Seething Whispers

**[SAMANTHA]**

Sam sighed as she unstrapped the dermabrace from her knee. The brace’s display bleeped once and then went dark, and she stretched her leg out to test her range of movement. No swelling, no stiffness, and just a faint twinge of pain. A few bruises, but nothing a dermascanner wouldn’t fix.

Multiple hairline fractures and a sprained tendon. Christ. She’d done more damage to her knee than she’d done to Varik's  _face_.

Her stomach roiled at the memory, and she grit her teeth, biting back a wave of nausea swelling up into her throat. She wasn’t a squeamish person; she’d stuck her hands into the chest cavity of a dying Horbalak, for crying out loud. Varik's blood was dark blue and tinged with green, but at least it wasn't filled with tiny wriggling parasites.

It wasn’t Varik's blood that had upset her, it was the fact that she’d been the one to make him bleed.

She was a doctor. She wasn’t supposed to _hurt_ people, she was supposed to _fix_ them. Apart from the time when that rowdy ensign had groped her at a bar on Sigma 3, she had never intentionally harmed another person.

She’d broken the ensign's nose, too. Being a doctor tended to give one a thorough understanding of human anatomy, and she’d always been good at calculating angles, thrust, and impact. A side-effect of having a pilot for a father.

The ensign had deserved it, but she’d still felt terrible. Even as the bouncer was escorting him out, she had shoved a cold pack in his hand, and given his very sheepish friend directions to the nearest medclinic.

Sam fiddled with the dermabrace, staring down at it with unfocused eyes. Had Varik deserved to have his nose broken? He had claimed her actions needed no forgiveness, but she felt like they did. He was teaching her how to fight, so a few injuries were surely to be expected.

She didn’t want to learn how to fight. But the prospect of experiencing something so shrouded in mystery, something that no other human had ever learned… it was thrilling. Intoxicating.

But was it enough? Was she a bad person for being so excited about this? She craved knowledge, and what she was learning – if not the knowledge itself – was violent and dangerous, but that didn’t mean _she_ had to be violent and dangerous, right?

With another heavy sigh, Sam rolled up the dermabrace and slid it back into its compartment and stood, stretching her sore muscles and taking a deep, cleansing breath. She grabbed a small dermascanner and headed out the door.

Varik had disappeared, presumably to heal his battered nose in private. As she turned down the hall and crossed into the living room, she activated her biolink’s external display. The flat hologram flickered to life above her wrist, and she slid down onto the couch with a sigh, eyeing the screen while she ran the dermascanner across the lingering bruises on her knee.

The biolink had spent most of the night searching all known radio frequencies for signs of contact. Null results blinked across the hologram in ominous red letters, casting her skin in a hellish glow. Sam sighed.

“Thanks for checking, buddy,” she said, dismissing the notification and pulling up the weather radar. The storm had spread across half the continent, and still appeared to be growing.

A burst of sleet skittered against the window, drawing her gaze.

Two months. Two months trapped on a mining station with a huge, grumpy Krill warrior who had attacked her base without warning or provocation.

Did her parents think she was dead?

Sam scrubbed her hands over her face. Stupid question. _Of course_ they thought she was dead. She’d have thought the same, in their position.

But she wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. Despite the fact that he seemed to be tolerating her presence, Varik could, in theory, lose his patience at any moment. He could turn on her, decide she was more useful dead than alive, or at the very least, less annoying.

Granted, he didn’t really seem like the type to do such a thing.

But then, neither had Thalon. He had been the one to ask her to lower her weapon, after all.

Sam had precious little combat experience, but she knew that in a majority of situations, such requests came with an implicit assurance of safety.

_Lower your weapon, and no harm will come to you._

Her heart clenched as a fresh wave of anger flooded through her veins, tightening in her chest. The memory of his treachery should not have hurt as badly as it did. Sam had always trusted her instincts, and they had never led her astray.

Until Thalon. If she’d been wrong about him, she could damn well be wrong about his brother.

She huffed irritably and stood, testing her knee before putting her full weight on it. In a perfect world, she’d have rested for another hour, just to be safe, but right now, her blood was burning beneath her skin, and her chest felt tight, and she needed to _move_.

This wasn’t the first time she’d run from her own thoughts. She had never been all that great at dealing with her emotions; like any self-respecting human, she preferred to bottle them up and shove them deep down inside her, where they could simmer for a while before bursting forth when she least expected it, rendering her either a sobbing mess or a screaming mess. Sometimes, both.

She’d made it halfway back down the hall to the medbay when footsteps interrupted her thoughts, and she spun around to find Varik walking towards her. There was no sign of swelling or bruising on his face, and he appeared to have washed the blood away, as well.

He stopped several feet away and tilted his head at her.

“Are you well?”

Sam hesitated, debating the merits of lying. It might get her out of training, but she wasn’t sure she _wanted_ to get out of training.

“I’m fine,” she said, “just returning the dermascanner.” She held up the small device, and his gaze shifted to it, paused, and then returned to her.

“I was not speaking of your injury,” he said in a flat voice. “You are tense, and your breathing is shallow. You are afraid.”

_Nope. Danger danger. Abort mission._

Without a word, Sam turned on her heel and started moving. She could hear Varik's footsteps shadowing her as she stepped into the medbay and stowed the dermascanner back in its compartment.

When she turned again, he was standing in the doorway. Blocking it.

“I’m _fine_ ,” she repeated.

Krill didn’t have eyebrows, but they had ridges where their eyebrows would have been, and as he stood there, staring at her, one of those ridges lifted in an expression of calm, patient skepticism.

Sam’s lips twitched, and she fought to maintain her scowl against the bubble of laughter rising in her chest. It occurred to her, in that moment, that there was no _correct_ way for Varik to react to her statement. She was being patently unfair, and she knew it, but her heart was a tangled knot of emotions too twisted and snarled to unravel, and she had no idea how to fix it. She didn’t even know if she _wanted_ to fix it.

She had been betrayed. She was angry, and she was hurt. She didn’t understand, and there was no viable course of action that would _help_ her understand. She sure as hell wouldn’t be gaining closure from Thalon any time soon.

And while the warrior who stood before her might be Krill, and he might be Thalon’s brother, he was not Thalon.

Even if Varik held similar beliefs… even if he would have done the same thing, had he been in his brother’s shoes…

She couldn’t know that, for certain. And she was not the kind of person who believed that the actions of one man should reflect badly upon an entire species.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them, he was still standing there, watching her. Waiting.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I’m… no, I’m not fine. Thalon betrayed my trust, and I’m having trouble believing that you won’t do the same. And I know that’s not fair to you, and I really don’t like what it says about _me_ , and…”

“I understand.”

If his tone had held even the _slightest_ hint of arrogance, or annoyance, or amusement, she would have told him right where he could shove it. But, instead, his voice was calm and even, and when she met his gaze, she found no hint of judgment in his eyes.

The tightness in her chest eased, and she scrubbed her hands over her face with a sigh and slumped down into her chair.

“Do you?” she asked in a rueful voice. “I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“You would, I think.” He crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, and that simple gesture was so casual, so _human,_ that it made her heart twist in her chest. “It is not unreasonable, given the circumstances.”

“Which are?”

Varik was quiet for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “You have good instincts, and you listen to them because they have never led you astray.” He paused, and his gaze drifted to the exam table. His lips thinned. “But the actions of my brother have called those instincts into question. You believe that he betrayed your trust; therefore you now question the integrity of those around you, as you can no longer be certain that your judgment is accurate. It is… understandable.”

Sam sat back in her chair. Her thoughts were jumbled about in her head, some clambering over others in their haste to make their way to her mouth. Everything he said made perfect sense, and hearing it spelled out so succinctly made her feel like an errant student being called out for missing a stupidly simple question on a pop quiz.

Wait.

No.

Everything he said made sense… except for _that one part._

“He _did_ betray my trust,” she said in a flat voice. “I lowered my weapon because he asked me to. Because I thought I would be _safe_.”

“Yes,” Varik said quietly. “He thought so, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can we talk about how much it sucks to name chapters? Because I hate naming chapters. HATE IT. Anyway, I hope y'all have a great weekend.


	11. Haunting Memories

“Bullshit.”

Varik blinked. Human curses were surprisingly creative in their vulgarity, but his translator recognized the underlying meaning easily enough, and as it substituted a synonymous interpretation in his mind, he bit back a growl rising in his chest.

No one had ever dared call him a liar, to his face or otherwise, but he would not rise to her bait so easily; if she wanted to draw him into a fight, she would have to try much harder than that. And she _did_ want to fight. He could see it in the tense line of her shoulders, and the way her fingers twitched on the armrests of her chair.

It occurred to him, at that moment, that perhaps their species had more in common than either of them realized; no matter how hard she was trying to suppress it, she was still aching for a fight, because it would release the tension building up inside her.

The only difference was that her version involved sharp words, and Varik’s version involved blunt fists.

“He was… deeply offended,” Varik said, thinking back to the look he had seen in Thalon’s eyes the moment the human had fallen. Varik had not recognized it, then; he had been too focused on the living, breathing miracle that was his brother, sitting there before him. But when Thalon had turned away from the little human’s body, his eyes had burned like the black fires of the abyss, it had startled Varik enough that he’d instinctively taken a step back, anticipating violence. “Had Thalon been in better health, I believe he would have attacked me.”

The human glanced down, fidgeting with a stray thread on her sleeve. Varik watched, curious. He had never had the opportunity to observe humans in such a casual environment, and he was unfamiliar with the finer points of their body language. He had already learned a great deal about this one, though, such as her habit of touching her hair or her face when she was distressed, and her tendency to bite her bottom lip when she was thinking. Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing for certain whether these were universal forms of expression, or just this one little female’s personal idiosyncrasies.

Finally, she looked up, and the hope that glinted in her eyes made his chest tighten.

“Why should I believe you?”

Varik shrugged. “Why would I lie?”

She stared at him for a long moment.

“Even if it’s true… even if Thalon had absolutely no intention of harming me...” She sat back, crossing her arms over her chest. “ _You_ certainly did.”

Varik was quiet for a long moment. In truth, he had never intended to harm her, though he knew she would not believe it. Krill edict stated that planets void of resources were of no worth to Avis, and so any attempt at seizing them could only result in wasting valuable Krill lives. Varik and his men had defended themselves against the base’s security, but they had pointedly avoided harming any unarmed civilians they came across.

“I came to Hanara to retrieve my brother’s body,” he said.

“Except he wasn’t _dead_.” She had that look in her eyes again, the same steely calm that he had seen just before he received a knee to the face, and her voice was colder than the icy winds that swirled beyond the viewport behind her. “And instead of _thanking_ me, you fucking _shot_ me.”

Varik frowned. “ _I_ am not the one who shot you.”

A short, bitter laugh. “You had the conn,” she said. “You could have stopped it, and you didn’t.”

And there it was. The cruel twist of fate that had landed them here, in this strange, tense situation.

He could have stopped Kish from shooting her, back on the science station. Just as he could have stopped Thalon from boarding that Union shuttle, six weeks ago.

But he had not stopped Thalon, and because of that, they were both still alive, today. If he had not allowed Thalon to infiltrate the Union shuttle, and had Varik not then diverted his own shuttle to follow, they _both_ would have been aboard the _Tarkos_ when it was torn to pieces by a tiny seed glued to a quantum time device.

And he had not stopped Kish from shooting the gray-eyed female who had stepped between Varik and his brother, staring him down with fierce, unwavering determination as she trained her weapon on his forehead.

And because of that, they were both still alive.

If he had stopped Kish from shooting her, she would have fled, and she would have been in that shuttle bay when the deflector failed. Another frozen, lifeless statue, reaching out towards the empty hope of salvation.

And Varik? He would have died in that corridor, bleeding, broken, and alone.

The great irony of it all was that he was going to die, anyway. She may have gotten him off that station, but she could not protect him from damnation. Krill scientists had been trying to do so for hundreds of years, and they were no closer to finding a cure for the Fading than when it first appeared. There were even some who considered it sacrilege to try to stop the Fading once it had taken hold, but there were others who fought to save those who were slowly losing their Souls.

Varik knew this, better than most. His ancestors were warriors, not priests. Men who recognized the value of Krill life, and sought to preserve it when they could.

His earliest memories were of his father and uncles slipping out into the darkness, armed with only their blades. And his mother, standing in the kitchen, stirring a vat of _kitashi_ stew, enough to feed a small army, and baking loaves of _parav_ , a flat, doughy bread made from powdered flowerbuds. The quiet murmur of conversation as aunts and cousins gathered in the living area to await the return of the men.

And the withered, broken Krill who returned with them, some too weak to stand on their own, all sunken and hollow, their skin flat and colorless, their dark eyes dull as ash.

He remembered, too, the way they changed, slowly returning to life amidst the warmth, and laughter, and companionship of Varik’s clan. The healing closeness of other Souls, calling their own back from the brink of damnation.

But it was not a cure.

Sometimes, Varik’s father was too late, and the men he brought home did not get better, but instead, continued to Fade, their bodies withering to pale, emaciated husks as their Souls bled out of their eyes. They had been isolated for too long, and the abyss had already claimed their Soul.

And sometimes, Varik’s father came home empty-handed, covered in dust and ash, weary from searching the caverns for the lost and the exiled.

And then, one night, Varik's father did not come back at all.

Varik grit his teeth, pushing the memory away, and while the old loss had faded over the years, there was one far more fresh and painful waiting to rise to the surface in its place.

Thalon had not come back, either.

The weeks that followed the destruction of the  _Tarkos_ had been torture. Each passing minute felt like a grain of sand slipping through his fingers, like a soul-deep, ravenous darkness was eating away at him as he searched desperately for some hint as to where the humans, those Soulless Avis-forsaken _bastards_ , had taken his brother.

By the time they found the base on Hanara, it was too late. He knew it. His men knew it. But he had come, anyway. Because he had remembered the look in his father’s eyes, and he had _understood_.

Varik stared down at the human, her pale eyes sparking with anger and scorn. And as the echoes of old memories lingered in his mind, he allowed himself to consider the question that he had been steadfastly ignoring since the moment he first stepped into her medbay.

_How?_

How had this little female managed to save Thalon, when three centuries of scientific and medical research had failed? Under any other circumstances, he might have assumed it was some unknown, external factor, or perhaps even a miracle of Avis. But his brother’s words were branded on his soul, bound there by the agonized fury that had burned in Thalon’s eyes.

_The answer to that question is lying on the floor behind you._

Now, the answer to that question was sitting right in front of him, and yet, he could not bring himself to ask. Not yet.

Because the answer to that question might change _everything_.

And Varik was afraid.

So, instead of asking, he straightened from his position at the door and started forward, noting the way the human tensed as he approached, her expression shifting rapidly from surprise, to confusion, to fear. Wordless frustration flared in his chest, and he bit back a growl. He did not want her to flinch away from him. He did not want her to go utterly still when he appeared in the doorway, frozen like cornered prey.

It would take time to earn her trust, and he had precious little of that left. But when he dropped to one knee before her and crossed his arm over his chest, her eyes widened and she leaned forward, just the tiniest bit, as if drawn to him, and Varik’s hearts clenched in his chest.

He did not want to die knowing that she was afraid of him.

He bowed his head and closed his eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was low and quiet, meant only for her.

“Thank you, Samantha.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a short one, and it's a Tuesday, but at least I'm writing again.


End file.
